lost boy lost girl (27 page)

Down in the alley, the bulldozer was collecting broken concrete blocks in its bucket and depositing them into the back of a pickup truck dropping progressively lower on its wheels. Uniformed policemen, four men in yellow space suits, and detectives in sports jackets milled around in Kalendar’s backyard and the alley. Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus was watching the wall removal from just inside Philip’s ruined fence. To Tim’s amazement, Philip stood next to him.

Myron called to say he was walking up the stairs at 55 Grand.

“You’re the man,” Tim said.

“You’re still out of town, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, I’m in your apartment,” Myron said.“Here we are. Are you sure this thing is plugged in? . . . Okay, it’s plugged in. You were using that program I installed?”

“Yes,” Tim said. “I want to return to the last website I was on. I want to go back to where I was when the computer crashed.”

“Nothin’s shakin’,” Myron said. “Let me undress this thing, see what I can see.”

For a minute and a half, Myron wielded his screwdriver and removed the case. “Now, let me get it turned around. . . . Holy shit. Maggie, look at this.”

Tim heard Maggie giggle.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your hard disk, man. It like . . . squirted out. I can just about wiggle it free, but it’s, like, misshapen. And it’s hot! What did this? The program didn’t do it.”

“I know,” Tim said. “I just said that to get you over to my apartment in a hurry.”

Myron agreed to set up a new hard disk before Tim returned to New York the next day.

“What was that website you wanted to get back to?”

“It’s not important. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right?”

Tim hung up and returned to the window. He felt shaken and oddly dispossessed by what had just happened. Mark, Lucy: running barely covered from the storm, like Adam and Eve. Even, it seemed, in that world, safety was fragile and came at a price. Yet their joy had burned through the image on his commandeered monitor, along with their absolute connection.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,
Tim remembered,
red sky at morning, sailor take warning.
The
Old Farmer’s Almanac
neglected to consider the case of red sky at midafternoon, when ragged beautiful Adam and ragged beautiful Eve made haste, made haste.

He watched the bulldozer scrape away and decant into the laden pickup the last of Joseph Kalendar’s eight-foot wall. As docile as a probationer, Philip Underhill had not strayed from Franz Pohlhaus’s side.

Tim let the screen door bang behind him. Philip turned his head to give his brother the glance of a captain to a platoon leader who had arrived late for a briefing. What he had seen must stay with him, Tim realized.

The fat, red-haired man in the cab of the bulldozer shouted, “Excuse me, Sergeant. Sergeant! Excuse me.”

“Sorry,” Pohlhaus said. “Yes?”

“Should I start on the ground now? We got a good clear shot.”

“Nice and slow,” Pohlhaus said. “Plus I want a DM man. Thompson! Pick up a shovel and work alongside Dozier here, will you?” One of the men in yellow space suits and clumsy boots trotted forward.

“The rest of you guys, move in as soon as we find something,” Pohlhaus said.

He gave Tim an unreadable glance. “Little news flash.” He seemed entirely gathered into himself, like a creature enfolded within its own wings. “Lloyd-Jones took himself out.” Anger surrounded him like a red mist. “Out of the game.”

“Oh, no,” Tim said. In his brother’s grim satisfaction, he saw that Philip already knew.

“About an hour ago, Lloyd-Jones killed himself in his cell. He ripped his shirt in half, tied one end around his neck and the other around one of his bars, and he rolled off the bed. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.”

“He got off so, so easy,” Philip said. “That sick bastard.”

“I guess he realized your brother wasn’t going to write a book about him,” Pohlhaus said.

The bulldozer snorted and jerked to a halt, rocking on its treads. Thompson, who had been treading backward in front of the machine as it delicately sliced away a thin layer of earth, shouted, “Sergeant! We got one!”

All three men at the bottom of Philip Underhill’s backyard walked over the defeated fence and into the alley. Officer Thompson scraped the blade of his shovel across the strip of earth, then bent down. Using one of his space gloves, he tugged into view a gray-green human hand, then an entire forearm, encased in a white sleeve.

“That’s not Mark’s arm,” Philip said.

Pohlhaus waved them back. The brothers retreated to Philip’s lot line and looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began his journey upward into daylight.

Acknowledgments

For professional assistance in the writing of this novel, thanks go to Visconti pens (Van Gogh and Kaleido), Boorum & Pease journals (900-3 R), and Kathy Kinsner (eighty words a minute); for moral and emotional support during the writing of this novel, grateful thanks to Lila Kalinich and Susan Straub; for her inspired editing, pro-found thanks to extraordinary Lee Boudreaux.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Straub is the author of sixteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, director of the Read to Me program.

ALSO BY PETER STRAUB

NOVELS

Black House
(with Stephen King)

Mr. X

The Hellfire Club

The Throat

Mrs. God

Mystery

Koko

The Talisman
(with Stephen King)

Floating Dragon

Shadowland

Ghost Story

If You Could See Me Now

Julia

Under Venus

Marriages

POETRY

Open Air

Leeson Park & Belsize Square

COLLECTIONS

Wild Animals

Houses Without Doors

Magic Terror

Peter Straub’s Ghosts
(editor)

Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists
(editor)

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters, with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2003 by Peter Straub

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Straub, Peter.

  lost boy lost girl : a novel / Peter Straub.

    p.  cm.

  1. Suicide victims—Family relationships—Fiction. 2. Abandoned houses—Fiction. 3. Mothers—Death—Fiction. 4. Teenage boys—Fiction. 5. Crime scenes— Fiction. 6. Girls—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.T6914L67 2003

813'.54—dc21    2003046689

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-316-9

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